MuseScore: Mastering Music Notation on Free Software (2025)

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone. Welcome to MuseScore Redoo. I made a Muse score class a while ago, and now I'm remaking it because it was popular and a lot of people liked it. But MuseScore has come a long way since I made the last one, so it needed a full update. In this class, we're going to be talking about differences between the iPad version and the desktop version. This class is going to focus on the desktop version, Mac Windows and Linux, even. If you're using any of those versions, you'll be just fine in this class. We'll walk through how the whole interface works. We'll talk about the three main ways you can input notes. Those would be by clicking notes in by using one of these keyboards or by using a musical keyboard or other MIDI device, including a mini guitar, if you want. We'll talk about adding text, lyrics. We'll even write some vocal music and sort of orchestral music together in this class. And I'll give you those files to keep and play with as you like. We'll go over adding score indications and all kinds of fun stuff to make a really professional looking score. We'll even deal with making parts. So please join us. It's a great class. I had a whole bunch of fun making it. Let's dive in right now. 2. About Your Instructor: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the use score remake class. I made a MuseScore class, I don't know, maybe six or seven years ago, and a lot has changed since then, so we're making a new one. Now, if you don't know who I am, I have about 120 or so classes here on this platform. I love making classes. They're great. I used to be a university professor last year. I left that gig to do this full time because I just love making these classes. I have a lot of fun doing it. And just talking about music like this is just so much fun. So, my name is J Anthony Allen. I go by J. So please call me J, if you like. I have a PhD in music, music composition to be specific. I've worked with everything from major American orchestras to TV shows, to films, to video games, to house parties and dance music festivals. I've had tracks on the charts and at the same time, had tracks on Netflix shows. I started off as a guitarist, actually. My undergrad degree is in classical guitar performance, if you can believe that. And then I played a whole in a whole bunch of bands throughout my college years. Probably none of which you've heard of. And then ended up in grad school and the more grad school and the more grad school. I got a whole bunch of degrees, which you can see here, here, this is a master's degree. This is another master's degree. Those two are master's degrees. And then this one is a PhD in music. This one is some kind of presidential award for something, and this one is just a nice little watercolor painting. Enjoy it. So, I write a lot of music. And most importantly, I teach a lot of music theory. A lot of my content that I have out into the world is in music theory and as such, I've been using MuseScore as a tool to teach music theory for a long time. I also use Mucore little bit to write and do my own music writing on. Although I use some other programs, too, and I'll talk a little bit about that later maybe. But MuseScore is a great program for writing music. It's a great notation program. You can't beat the price, and there's a lot of things we can do with it. So enough about me, let's talk about Mucore. 3. What is Musescore?: Okay, so what is MuseScore? Let's say, hypothetically, for the purposes of right now, there are two types of audio production programs, okay? There's more than that. But let's just say there's two. There are programs that we call digital audio workstations like DA DAW. Maybe you've heard of these before. Maybe you haven't. Those are, like, big programs that we use to put together music with audio and Mi, and we slide things around and make whole songs by moving things around. But then there's a whole other kind of program that relies on traditional notation. Those Da programs rarely ever rely on traditional notation. They use something different called a piano grid. These traditional notation programs, of which there are a few do exactly that. They give us a way to organize music in time using traditional music notation, which is great. But they are different than those digital audio workstation programs. So if you're coming to Mus Core thinking that you're going to make beats or something like that, it's probably not going to work. But if you're coming to Muscore thinking you're going to write a piece for choir or string quartet or orchestra, or I don't know, concert band, any acoustic music, then you're in the right place. Garage band is a free program that will let us click in or play in music, and it will put it together on a page really nicely so we can hear it back. We can hear it played, and we can also print out a nice score and give it to human musicians to play for us. There's all kinds of cool things we can do. And yes, in theory, we could make beats and stuff with it, but it would be kind of a pain, and I wouldn't recommend doing that. Let me just open. I hope they don't mind if I do this, but I'm just going to open one of my student projects here. So this is one of my student projects. Untitled score. But you can see here we have an ensemble of some brass, percussion and strings. And the percussion does some cool stuff, a lot of strings, rhythmic things. He's left some notes for us to talk about in our lessons. This has been really cool. This ended up being a really cool piece that he's working on for a video game scene. I don't want to show you too much of it because I haven't asked him if that's okay yet. But that's what MuseScore can do, and that's what it's for. Now Mucore is a program that was at one point, this is the confusing part about Mucore. Mucore was free and open source, okay? Open source means that the source code was free. Anyone could download it, and if you really knew your stuff, you could make changes to the code and then rebuild it and have your own version of the program. It is not that anymore. I don't think there's now a company who has kind of taken it over, and it's still free, but they try to kind of upsell you some stuff. So it's a little complicated, and we'll talk more about that upsell stuff. Just know that if you really want to use Muscore, there is a way to do it without buying anything, okay? But in order to fully do that, you need to know a few tricks around some kind of in app purchases they've made for you. So let's talk about version information, and that'll clear up a few things about what this company has laid out for us now. So let's talk about versions. 4. Version Information: Okay, so this is very important, okay? The version of Muscore that I'm using is version 4.4 0.3 blah, blah, blah. 4.4. And it's officially MuseScore Studio. Now, here's the thing. I'm using Mucore on a MAC. This class is going to follow MuseScore on a Mac, on a PC or I think on Linux. All of those platforms will be the same. If you follow along on those, we will be just fine. Now, there is an iPad version of MuseScore, and that is not this. That is not what we're doing. Don't get that version. Okay? That is a whole other thing. I'll talk about that in a couple of videos from now. I'll show you what that looks like, but don't get that. That's really just like a reader. You can't make stuff with it. Okay? So I am on the Mac version 4.4. If you're on the PC or Linux version 4.4 or even just version four, you'll be just fine. If you're on any version four, you'll be fine. If you're on version three, I recommend you upgrade to Version four. It's a free upgrade. If you're on version five, which for me, doesn't exist yet, but I'm recording this class, you may be watching this in the future. If there are future versions that do a significant upgrade, I will post upgrades. I'll post new videos that show the new features. But if the upgrades are really significant, I'll probably make a whole new class. So you can probably get through a few versions just with this class. So Mu score five, maybe even six, probably isn't going to be wildly different to warrant a whole new class. Buttons might move around from here to there, but more or less, all of the functionality is going to stay the same. So you're probably good with this course for a while. Alright, let's talk about that iPad version right now, actually. 5. The iPad App: Okay, so if you download the tablet version, it's basically a free app that does nothing until you pay for it. Now, let me say that what it's going to do what that app does is it's not a notation creator, like the desktop app is. What it is is like a learn to play music thing, and it's cool. It's cool. Don't get me wrong. It's cool. If you want to use it, you should use it. But it's kind of different than what we're doing. So this is it. I actually already have an account on it, but I set up a new one just so you could see. So it says, Today we're creating a free trial, and I've just launched the program for the first time. Premium performance and practice features. There are two more days left to enjoy premium. You'll be charged November 26. What am I being charged for? Uh MuseScore one. I still don't know what I'm paying for. 214 99 a year for a seven day trial. Okay, so here's what we get. We can download and print from a big library of scores. That's kind of cool. That's worth something. Practice mode, immerse yourself in music with seamless interruption. There's no ads. There are official scores transcribed by some well known publishers, customized playback, some music instruction where you can get lessons prepared for you by expert tutors, including me, I have a whole bunch of classes in that. So if you do do that, you can find some of mine in there. Professional education. Maybe that's where my stuff is. I don't know. Digital books. Maybe there's some stuff by me in there. I don't know. Okay, so you're gonna pay some money for it, and it's cool, but that's not what we're doing, okay? So check it that out if you want, but just remember that's a totally different program. We're going to focus on the one that is a notation program and lets you write notation. It's not the iPad thing. Okay, let's talk about installation and setup. 6. Installation: Okay, so this is very easy program to install. What I want you to do is just go to muscor.com. You don't need an account or anything, and you're just going to find the Download button, which is right here. Get Desktop App. Get Mucore Studio, we call it now. So you're going to click that. It's going to download the program right here. Free Download Muscor studio. MacOS, because that's what I'm on. But there's also oh, they also like this Muse hub thing that they're doing. So you can download this Muse Hub app if you want, and inside that app, you can download the program if you want. Or you can just download the program if you want. This, I think, is going to download this Muse Hub thing if you want. It doesn't matter. If you don't want to deal with anything, we're just hit this button and you won't download their little downloader app, which you don't need. Once you do download it, you're going to get this window if you're on a Mac, and you're just going to have to drag the app over to applications, and then you'll go into applications and launch it. And it's pretty much ready to go super simple. If you're on a PC, you'll get a similar window that comes up, just follow the instruction. It's a normal installation. Nothing too weird. Now, there is some other installation things we need to do like setting up a mini keyboard and stuff like that. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. For now, get that far, launch the program, and then we'll get started setting up scores and writing some of our own music in just a few minutes. One last thing before we do that, I want to talk about playback real quick. So let's go to one final introductory video for that. 7. A Note About Playback: Okay, I want to talk about playback really quick before we get too far. A lot of people come to these programs, these notation programs because they want to input notes and hear them played back by, like, an orchestra. And you can totally do that with these programs. We will do it. Super cool. But I want you to temper your expectations with that, okay? Because you tell if you just ask uscore to, like, play some orchestra music, it's not going to sound good, okay? Muse score and kind of all notation programs, they are designed to be good at notation. The playback system. That's kind of like a secondary thing that they can do. It's not their main purpose, right? So you're not going to hear the most amazing sounding orchestra, right? Let's Let's hear a little bit of this student piece. Okay? It starts off with a suspended cymbal role. I'm just going to warn you on that. And then we go into this percussion and string thing. Ready? Here we go. Like Okay, now, it sounds actually pretty good, but it's not awesome, right? Like, we're not hearing the snare drum or the bass drum. Whatever samples he was using for that didn't come over. We'll talk about what that means later. But it doesn't sound like the most realistic thing in the world. There are things we can do to make it sound better. For example, this is a piano piece by another student, mind you, which is why it doesn't look awesome on the page, but it's actually a really beautiful start to a piece. And this is using some higher end samples from outside of MuseScore. And we're going to talk about how to do this. Near the end of the class, I'll tell you how to set up nicer samples so that your playback sounds better. So this is using a higher end piano sound. Okay, so that's quite a bit better sound. Now, there's also things you can do where you can take your notes, export them into a program that is designed to play them back really well. So all of those are options. I just want you to understand that when we hit play on these programs right out of the box, these programs don't sound awesome. That's not their main job. Their main job is to let you notate stuff. But there's some tricks I'll show you later in this class on how to make it sound as good as possible. Alright. Let's dive in and start learning how to use this thing. 8. The “Start Center”: Okay, so we've got news score setup. We've got it installed, and we're going to launch it, and this is what we get. Let's call this the Start Center. That's what they call it. So here's what we see. You probably don't see these other projects here, maybe you do if you've experimented around with it a little bit. But if you're just starting it for the first time, this is maybe what you see. You probably just see this plus new score. There's a few other things here that we can explore. Honestly, I don't really use anything here, and I'll explain kind of why in a minute. Really what I do when I see this screen is I really just hit this plus and go to new score or maybe I open one of my existing ones. But what I don't do is I don't really go to my online scores. This requires you to have one of those, like, I think, audio.com accounts or something using their online service, which is cool, but I don't use it. I just save all my stuff locally. These are some extra tools you can add. You probably have to pay for them or something, so I'm not interested in those. These are some lessons they have and things on how to use MuseScore, which is cool. And then I guess there's an account we have or something. That's cool, I guess. It's funny that my wedding picture is my picture there. I don't know why that is, but whatever. Okay, so I'm going to go to NESCOe now, let's look at what we have here. We can do two things. We can build our score here or we can go from a template. So, let's build our own right now, and then in the next video, we'll use a template and show you that. Okay, so let's say what do we want to make? Let's say we want to make a piano trio. That sounds fun. So piano trio, let's do piano, Cello and clarinet. I think that classifies as a piano trio in some way. So, we need to find those three things in these lists. So we could just search here, search or we could go through here. So let's go keyboards, piano. Now you need to hit this to add it to your score and the list. Okay? So piano Cello strings bode viola Cello. Same as Cello and violin. Okay, there they are. Now, they're going to put them by default, it's gonna put them in orchestral order, which is gonna be like wins, brass, piano and harp, percussion, no, percussion, piano and harp, strings. That's orchestral order. For a small ensemble like that, that's not really what I want. I think I want the piano at the bottom. So I need to change this. I'm just going to change it to custom. And then I'm just going to move things around with this how I want. Okay, I can make them a soloist, but I don't actually want that. Okay, so custom order, move things up or down with that, and then I can hit done, and it will load up my score. But I don't want to quite do that yet. Let's look at the templates. Because most of the time, that's a little easier to do if you're using, especially if you're working with a big ensemble. So let's look at that. 9. Creating a New Score with Templates: Alright, let's do this another way. And this time, let's use the templates, which are much easier to use. So I'm going to hit New Score, and now I'm going to go to Create From Template. Okay? Now I've got popular or more common ensembles. I wouldn't say popular, but common ensembles. Okay. So if I want a choral ensemble, some kind of choir, SATB, and a lot of different variations of it, chamber music ensembles, string quartet, wind quintet, sax quartet, brass quartet. Solo, guitar, guitar with tableture, guitar tblasu, solo piano, some jazz things, big band, jazz combo, popular rock band, Bluegrass band, Band and percussion, concert band, marching band, that kind of stuff, and then orchestral, classical orchestra, symphony, and string orchestra. Now, what's cool about these templates is that they are not set in stone. Let's say I want choir with clarinet. I could go SATB and then add a clarinet after we get through this process. Let me show you. So let's go SATB choir, and then let's hit next. Okay? Now we have the option to add more stuff. And you'll have this next window, too. In the previous video, when we made our own ensemble, if we would have hit next, we would have got this too, okay? So, no matter whether you make your own ensemble or use a template, you're going to get here, okay? All of this stuff you can change later. So you don't have to make these decisions now, but, um, you can if you want. So let's say the title of this piece is J's Mucore class. The composer is Jay and his online students. No subtitle, no lyricist, copyright. 2025 J. Okay. I could change any of the stuff I want. Let's say the tempo we want to be 12. Okay, done. Okay, I don't need this mixer right now. We'll hide that. I'll show you how I did that in a minute. Well, I hit this little mixer button right here at the top. But more on the mixer later. Okay, so here's my stuff. Here's my SAT beat. It set all of this up for me. It looks lovely. If I wanted to add another instrument, I can easily just go up to this instrument properties right here. And hit Add. And now it takes me back to that first window where I could say clarinet. Clarinet and B flat. Sure. Click on it. Make sure you hit this little arrow. Now it's in our ensemble. I choose where I want it. Probably want it maybe I want it at the top. And there it is. Clarinet and B flat. 10. Instrument Settings: Okay, now that we're in this instruments tab, let's see what else is in here, okay? Now, first of all, if you don't see this instruments tab, I should have pointed this out before because I'm not sure it's up by default. If you don't see it, go to your View menu up here and make sure you are showing instruments. Looks like there's a F seven key command. So show instruments that will make this tab pop up. Click on it, and you should see all of your instruments with the add button. Okay, let's see what these other things here do. Now, if you click on an instrument, you're going to get these up and down arrows if we click on one there. That'll just let us change the order that they're in, and that's going to change the order here. So if we decide we want that clarinet at the bottom, we can move it to the bottom. Let's move back to the top because that looks funny to me. We've got a little eye here. We can show or hide, so we want to hide that clarinet. Cool. It's gone. It's great. This little show hide triangle here, we can show some stuff. And now we're seeing that we're breaking out the clarinet by staff, okay? Now, this is a little confusing because the clarinet only has one staff, right? But let's think of something like the piano, right? The piano has two staves, so it has a trouble claf and a bass class. Let me show you. Let's add a piano. So let's go here and let's go piano. Let's add it, right? Let's put a piano at the bottom. Okay, I'm gonna move it to the bottom. Now I feel like the clarinet should actually go with a piano. Okay, piano clarinet, okay? Now, let's look at that piano. If I open that up, the piano has two staves, okay? So I can hide one of them. Maybe I don't need the bass clef of the piano for some reason. I can also add another staff if I want. I can go into some settings for each one of these, and I can change the name and the abbreviated name. Now, the abbreviated name is important. You're always going to see, and this is like standard music convention, you're going to see the full name of the staff at the very beginning of the piece. And in all other situations, every other time that the staff starts, we're going to get the abbreviated name. Okay? So you see the abbreviated name most places. We can switch the instrument, et cetera. Or we can get rid of the instrument altogether by hitting this trash button. Cool. Okay, so a lot of control over what instruments we have in our score and where they are. Next, let's talk about assigning playback instruments. 11. Assigning Playback Instruments: Okay, let's talk about how to figure out what sounds each instrument is going to use to play back. This is actually really hard to find. I don't know why they've hidden this away so far, but it's not here. It's not in anything to do with our instruments. You would think it would. You would think there would be some button here that says, Oh, right here is where you tell it what sound to use. It's not. We got to go to our mixer. So there's a few different ways we can get to our mixer, and you just saw me do one way. There's a mixer button right here. We can get it there. We can also go to View Menu down here. Hit it, or you can do F ten. Okay? Now, for me, it shows up at the top. I think that's a setting I did at some point. It might show up for you in a different spot, and it might pop up at a new window. However it pops up, we want to be sure that we see this sound heading at the top of the mixer. That's what we're looking for. Now, what we probably have here is something like MS Basic. I think that is MuseScore Basic sounds, what comes with MuseScore. Okay? So if I look down here, soprano Alto, tenor bass clarinet, let's look at the piano one, for example. So we're on MS Basic, and if I click on the little arrow here, we see MS Basic, and let's go down to sound fonts, MS Basic. And this is set to choose automatically, which I think means that it just looks at the name of the instrument and finds one that fits, which would be a piano. Now, if you want this is where you can change it. If you want to get into really nice sounding instruments, you can select VST here and change it to one of these, which you probably don't have, but these are really nice sounding things that I've installed on my computer. We'll talk more about how to do that and how to find nice sounding instruments later. But if you want to experiment with different sounds, these are all the sounds that are gonna come with us score that are built in. And there's some weird ones here. There's a bunch of pianos, detuned piano, FM electric piano, harpsichord. There's some drum kits, strings, some world stuff. I found a halfway decent Shakuhachi in here the other day, right here. So there's some fun stuff you can do. Now, I will say that midi choirs are always weird and kind of terrible. In order to demonstrate that, let me just write a little something here for you. I'm just going to pause and write something. Okay, I wrote just a little choral thing, just a couple chords just to give you an idea of what these sound like. The thing is about, Hey, Jenks, there's my dog Jinx trying to wag his tail 'cause he wants to go outside, which we'll do in just a minute. Anyway, the thing about, like, midi choir sounds is that they don't they can't say anything, right? So they're just gonna go or oh or something like that. These ones, I just listen to this, and these ones actually sound okay, but they're usually pretty hilarious, the midi choirs. Here's what it sounds like. Okay. That's actually not bad. That's one of the better ones I've heard, to be honest. But anyway, that's how you play with instruments and sounds. 12. The MuseScore Interface: Okay, so in this next section, I want us to kind of take a little step back and just look at the interface of MuseScore, okay? So I want to go over each of the kind of big sections just to get us familiar with the layout of the program. And then after that, we're going to start putting in notes, okay? So here are the main big sections of this program. If we go to view, we can kind of see most of them. First, I'm just going to call the tool bar. So we can show or hide a few different things on the toolbar, but it's basically this area up here, okay? That's the toolbar, this top part. So this is the tool bar, this very top part here. Then we've got our note entry tools which are here. And we can customize this a little bit. We'll talk about that in a minute. Then we've got all these different palettes, okay? If we click on palettes, or if you go to View palettes, you can see all of these. There's a lot of different palettes here, different tools that we have for dealing with different things. We'll go over all of those shortly. Okay, those are the main things. There are a bunch of other things, and we'll kind of wrap those all up in one video, but those are the main tools that we need to really kind of wrap our head around this program. So let's dive in and let's focus first on this tool bar area. 13. The Toolbar: Okay, up here in the tippy top. Now, I'm not going to go over, like, every single button because I just want to focus in this class on the things we need to get going and making cool music. Some of the really advanced stuff, you can come back and explore it if you like. But up here, we have the Home button. That's going to take you back to the Start Center. Score is where we are and publish gives you a view of what it's going to look like when we print it and we have some controls to print. Publish it tomscore.com. Should you want to do that? Share on audio.com. Should you want to do that, or export as a PDF or something like that. I believe export as an audio file is also here. So let's go back to our score. Here, we can also toggle between the parts and mixer. So we've already seen mixer. What is parts? Parts means the individual parts. So this is a tricky thing. So for example, soprano Alto tenor bass, clarinet and piano. So in reality, if we were giving this to an ensemble of humans to perform live, we probably need three or maybe only two actually parts. We probably want a part that is all the choir parts together, and then we want to part with just the clearing up part alone, and maybe we want a piano part alone, and maybe we want our piano part combined with the choir. It all depends. So we can manage that here. We can go create a new part to combine parts together. We can rename, duplicate parts and control each individual part here. So that's where you're going to get access to the individual parts. I highly, highly recommend don't mess around with individual parts until you are super done with your piece, okay? Because they're gonna stay in sync up until you start messing with stuff in your parts. So save parts until very, very, very end after you've put in everything into your score. Alright, then over here, we've got just a few play controls, play rewind. This little thing means we can adjust this. We can grab it. These little six dots here. We can grab this and pull it out and have it be kind of its own, you know, floating window if we want. I like to have it pinned up there. Someone's can drag it back up there. But we've got a metronome here, some playback settings. If we need them, timer, where we are. That comes in really handy later. What bar and beat we're on our tempo, and kind of an undo and a redo button. So nothing too complicated, but good to know where all that stuff is, especially play. Now, like almost all audio and music programs, there is a universal play key command. There's only one music program I have ever encountered in my whole life that didn't use the Spacebar as a play button. And Mucore does it too. So if you want to just hit Play, hit Spacebar. We card. I think I accidentally hit something because there's no way that that is an A flat. There we go. So hit play. Incidentally, if I remember right, the one program that didn't hit play with the space bar, I think it was Cubase, maybe it was a while ago, so maybe Cubase has changed that, but it doesn't matter. Alright, so that is the tool bar. Now let's talk about our note entry tools up here. 14. Note Entry Tools: Okay, let's look at our node entry tools here. There's very important stuff here, because entering notes is kind of a big part of what we do in MUSCRe, right? First of all, little slick dots, right? We already know what that does. That means we can grab it and pull it out. So maybe that's useful to you. I think we can actually change the shape of it by grabbing the end here, click and drag. No, I thought we could. Okay, so, obviously, these are notes, okay? So you can see this note right here is blue. So that means it's highlighted, okay? I've selected it by clicking on it, okay? So any rhythmic value up here I click on, it's going to change that to it, okay? So, no matter what I click on up here, it's going to change that. Okay? If I just click in an empty measure, it's gonna change it to a rest because I actually clicked on a Rest. Okay? I'm just gonna hit Undo a few times to get rid of that and go back here and hit a whole note. Okay? Now, you can also do it the opposite, which is much easier, and that is hit the rhythm first and then play the note. But we'll talk about that later. Okay? Here is rest. So what we're going to end up doing is when you want to rest, you're going to hit combinations of notes. You're going to hit rest and then a value and then a rhythmic value. So let's go, down here. So we'll talk more about this in a minute, but you're going to say, like, rest 16th note, and then you're going to get a 16th note rest. You get all of this because MuseScore is trying to fill out the measure always. More on node entry later, okay? Here we can add double flats, flats, natural, sharp, double sharp, tie, slur, different kinds of accents, tenuto, staccato, make something a triplet or any other kind of tuple. Flip the direction of the stem, switch voices, add something else to this palette. So there's other things you can add to this palate, like weirder things should you need to. But I've never needed to add anything to this palette, so you should be good. And then some settings, should you need them. Um, Okay, now there's one very important tool I skipped over this one, okay? This is basically what we have here is a pencil tool that we can turn on and off, okay? Now, you can think of this as the toggle between entering notes and not entering notes, Okay? When this is off, we can click on notes. And we can change them based on where we've clicked. But when it's on, and I click somewhere, I'm going to enter a note. Like, now you can see I'm getting this kind of ghost note, and if I click somewhere, I've added a note, okay? So this is your toggle between clicking to enter notes and clicking just click stuff, right? I can click something and change it when this is not blue, or I can turn it blue and I can click something to add more notes. Okay. More on that when we enter the mouse entry mode, which we'll talk about shortly. I know I keep saying, we'll talk about that soon, but we're early in the course. Just trust me. I'll get to all this stuff. Okay, let's go on to talk about the palettes. 15. The Pallets: Okay, I'm going to put my note entry tools back up here by just dragging them with that little six dot thing up to where they go. I could also, I think, put them in different places, maybe at the bottom. Yeah, I could put them at the bottom on the side. Oh, that's how you get the different shape of them. You can put them there. You can put them wherever you want, and yours might look different, but that's you can customize a lot of this program. Okay, now, palettes. Those are here. If you don't see them, go to view and then palettes, okay? Now, you might not see all that I see, okay? You can go up here and add more. Here are there are, like, a lot of palettes. Here's, like, bagpipe embellishments, okay? I have not added bagpipe embellishments to my list because I have not yet had a need to add bagpipe embellishments. Need those. So I have not add them because I don't want them cluttering up my stuff. I cannot foresee a future where I need bagpipe embellishments. But if I do if that big bagpipe commission comes in, and I got that big bagpipe gig, I know exactly where to find the bagpipe embellishment tool palette. It's right there. All of that was a silly way to say, you know, we can show here what we need to show. But if you don't find something you're looking for, you can add more tools here. Now, what are the palettes? If you're looking for a symbol or any kind of thing to put in your music, a symbol is a good way to put it. Look in the palettes. If it's not a note, it's probably in the palettes, okay? Let's say, like, I want to find, like, I don't know, um, Well, crescendo. Okay. I'm going to look here. Where am I going to find a crescendo? Lines, fingering diagrams, fingerings, guitar stuff, arpeggios, breaths and pauses, clefts, key signatures, time signatures, tempo, pitch, accidentals, dynamics, articulations, texts, keyboards, repeats and jumps, bar lines, layout. Probably dynamics. Cool. I open that up. Here's a bunch of dynamic stuff. So here's a crescendo. I can click and drag and plop that right where I want it. Now, you see that pink thing. That's important. That's telling you where it's going to attach this. It's important where it attaches it because when we extract parts, this symbol needs to go with the right part, right? So if I want this crescendo to be on the soprano part, but I do this? Did you see what I did right there? Like, I just attached it to the Alto part, right? That's no good. I'm going to delete. So if I want it on the soprano part, I can't do this. I need to do that. I just push it up a little bit more until that little pink line grabs the soprano line. Okay? I can do that, and then I can move it around, you know, I can put it wherever I want once I create it and it becomes part of the soprano part, right? I can put it all over the place. I can put it way down here if I want, 'cause I've attached it to the soprano part. Okay. I think it probably should go up top. You'll see other things kind of get out of its way smartly. Now you'll see all these little boxes. Those are just changing the shape of it. If I grab it here, I can make it longer. So I can play around with the shape of it by grabbing those little boxes. Okay. Let's say I want to say get two fortissimo. Grab that. And let's say I want to do this on the Alto A and the tenor, et cetera. Okay, so you get the point. Another good one is text. Here's text. There's a bunch of different kinds of text, things in boxes, things with lines on them, things in italics. I like the staff text sometimes. So I'm going to attach it somewhere, and then I'm going to double click on it, and then I'm going to say, I am text. Now, this is different than lyrics. This is just for all of this text is for score indications, like, you know, perform this in such and such a way. If you want lyrics, that's a separate thing. If you want lyrics, we're going to go up to add menu, text, and then down to lyrics. And it's giving me an error because it's saying you got to select a note. So I select a note, and then I go to add text, lyrics or Command L. And now, as I type, it'll stick to the note. So text, space, test, space, test, space. Neat. We'll talk more about that later. So there's a ton of palettes. Whenever you're looking for anything, palettes. Look for a palette. If it's not in that palette, see if it's in another palette. Okay? That's probably where it is. 16. Other Interface Elements: Okay, there are a lot of other areas of this program that you can reveal if you want. They are really for more advanced things, but you're welcome to explore them. I'm not going to go into too much detail on those advanced things here. Maybe someday I'll do an advanced music core class. But let me just show you how to get access to some of them. Just about all of them can be found under the view menu up here. So let's look at the timeline. Okay? This is strange. This is strange in a notation program, where it's going to show you where you have music in a timeline. I don't know how exactly this is useful, but it might be for you. I'm going to hide that. We can see our mixer playback setup, some more playback tools. There are Bail settings. There are some tools that exist for writing music in Bail. I don't understand at all how they work. I think they're beautiful that they exist. And I'm so glad that people who use Bail have access to these tools. I don't know how they work, but this is where you would get that information right here. I think it's option F 11. There's navigator selection filter, master palette. Looks like this. This shows you everything that there possibly is to see if you're looking for something. I wish this was searchable. So I guess there's not too much. Okay, with that said, let's move on, and let's talk finally about inputting notes. 17. The 3 Note Input Methods: Okay, in this section, we're going to talk about entering notes. Now, there's three primary ways that we can enter notes, and kind of four. So the three main ways are we can click notes in using a mouse. That's what I did to enter these notes. Okay? So clicking notes in with a mouse. There's playing notes in with a music keyboard, like a piano keyboard. We can enter notes using this kind of keyboard, okay? We'll go over all three of those, okay? And you can decide what works best for you. Now, what people typically do is kind of pick their favorite and get good at that method. But you can switch around and do whatever you feel like doing. The fourth way that's kind of a fourth way to enter notes is, like, to make MIDI somewhere else and import it, like importing a MIDI file that you made in a sequencer or something like that. You can do that. You can just go to File and then open and open a MIDI file. So that is perfectly possible. But in this section, we're going to focus on those three things midi input, playing it on a keyboard and step input. You might be thinking, you know, just like I just want to play it in and have it notate it. It's a little tougher than you think. Not playing it in, it's the rhythm. It's the computer figuring out the rhythm. But we'll talk more about it in just a second. Let's start with clicking it in using the mouse, because that's going to teach us a whole lot about how this works. So let's go to a new video and talk about how that works. 18. Mouse Input: Okay, so let's add a little clarinet line to this. I rather like this weird little chord progression that we came up with. So let's see if we can actually, no, let's just add a clarinet line. So I'm gonna zoom in a little bit. I zoomed in just with two finger, like, pulling apart. You can also zoom in with these controls down here in the bottom right corner of the screen. Okay, so right now, if I click in the measures here, nothing happens because I haven't toggled this button on or off, okay? So I'm going to turn it on, okay? And now what rhythm do I want? That's my next question. So this is on, so we're going to write a note. And let's do a half note. Okay, now I'm going to go down to my clarinet. Now, my clarinet is transposed. Clarinet in B flat. It has a different key signature than everything else, right? If you don't know what we're talking about here, that's okay. All you really need to know is that the clarinet is a transposing instrument. That means we write notes different for it than we do for other instruments. We can turn its transposing off. All I'm going to do is double click on its name real quick. And I'm going to go in this window, I'm gonna go here. I'm just gonna say zero. No transposition. I can turn it back on later. It's fine. Cool. Now it's just a normal clarinet. Well, now it's an abnormal clarinet, but that's okay. Okay. So now I'm going to turn on my note entry. I'm gonna get a half note, and let's play a C. And then, so I'm just going to put the mouse where I want it. This is where it really helps to zoom in, 'cause if you're zoomed way out, it's really hard to see where you are, right? It's hard to see what note you're on. So, the more you zoom in, and I mean, like, zoom way in if you want. There's no harm in it. Okay, so let's go here to that little leading tone there. And then what chord is this? Can I put an A there by chance? Yeah. Okay, let's do a whole note here. Okay? Now let's tie. Oh, that's gonna be ugly. Okay, I changed my mind. So let's turn this note into a dotted half note, okay? So it is still selected. We can tell that because that note is blue. So I can go back up here. I don't have to turn this off, and I can hit the half note and the dot, and then I can go back and click that again, okay? And now it filled out the measure by adding the last quarter note that I needed, but that's not the note I want. So I could just select a quarter note up here and now go down and change it to what I want. But then I'm going to get a chord, right? Like, let me think about what note I actually want. Um, let's go F sharp. So I'm going to grab a sharp before I play that note. That's a little bit easier before I enter that note. So I'm going to hit a sharp. So now I've got a quarter note and a sharp loaded up, and I'm going to put it right there, okay? Now, I've got two notes. That's not what I want. Okay, so now we need to get rid of a note. So I'm going to go back here. I'm going to turn that off. And now I'm just going to click on that A, that blue note. And now that it's selected, I'm going to press the delete key. Easy enough. Now I have what I want. So now I'm going to keep going. Now give me a whole note, and let's jump up to, like, a D. Okay, so now I have a whole note and a whole rest. And I have this off. Turning this on and off is like the biggest thing that's going to trip you up right away. You're gonna be like, Why can I enter a note? What's going on? It's 'cause you don't have this on. So keep in mind, you're gonna be going back and forth to this all the time. Okay, so I'm going to jump up to a D here. And let's tie this D together. So I'm gonna put two Ds. Now, here's my tie, right? And this note was selected, so I just clicked on the tie and I added it. But let's say it wasn't. If I want to tie these two notes, one thing I can do is just turn this off and then go and click this note. Now I'm going now I'm just going to select it, right? So this note is selected, I hit Tie, and it adds it, okay? So you just have to pay attention to when you're selecting a note and when you're adding a note. If you do want to add chords, you can just like anything else, by adding notes at the same time. I just don't want to give that to my clarinet player because clarinets typically can't play chords. Alright? So there's my fun little clarinet melody on top of our choir. Let's hear it. H. Lovely. 19. Keyboard Input: Okay, next we're going to do keyboard input, but not music keyboard, this kind of keyboard, okay? We can enter notes using this kind of keyboard, okay? Now, to me, this is kind of tricky. This takes some practice to get good at. But I've seen people do this in real time. They're just like. It's crazy. Um, one thing I want to show you first is that navigating around the keyboard in doing this can be a little tricky. There's a lot of key commands to remember when you're doing this. So look at this. This is a cool graphic that I found online on the MuseScore website. That outlines all of the key commands. If you zoom way in, you can see, you know, Z is going to be undo, mirror note head, flip direction of the staff, add a slur, all of these things that will be really helpful if you want to stick just to your typing keyboard. So in the next thing, I'm going to include this in the class. So I'll give this to you as a PDF to download in the next thing. So that's here in the downloads. So that'll be helpful if you want to use this kind of note entry. But basically, what we're going to do is we're going to put our cursor where we want. So I'm going to turn this off and I'm going to click right there so I get a box around the measure. Okay? Now I'm going to click the rhythm that I want. I still I'm going to control all the rhythms with the mouse, and I can control all the rhythms with the numbers, on the keypad. If you look here, all your rhythms are here. So you could type four for the rhythm, and then type A to get the pitch A and then adjust the octave by, I can't remember what the octave shift shift is. It's usually in a corner. I can't remember. Somewhere, there's an octave up and down button. But so let's try it. So I'm going to press, five is a quarter note. So five A. Five S. Ooh, S is a slur. Five D, five F, G. Okay? So the other thing is that you don't have to press a rhythmic value every time. If you want a string of eighth notes, just press the eighth note button, which is four, and then you can press All the notes you want, I just kind of slammed my fingers down and pressed a whole bunch. Okay? You can enter notes that way. You can never touch a piano keyboard, a mini Controller, or your mouse, if you want to do that. You can navigate this whole program just with the keypad. This is not how I want to live my life, but if you want to live your life that way, you should do it. Again, I've seen masterful people do this. Try it out. See what you think. Alright, remember that this is in your downloads for this class. And now let's talk about using a Mi Controller. 20. MIDI Keyboard Input: All right. You want to record with a MIDI device, okay? First of all, we need to set up your MIDI device, okay? So I have keyboard here. Here on my desk. Okay? So I'm going to use this to enter notes for this part, okay? Now, this is actually quite simple to do. So to set up a MIDI keyboard, if you have one, go to your preferences in Muscore and then let's go to audio MIDI. And let's go to MIDI and MIDI input, okay? Now, we need to find whatever your keyboard is there. So these are all the MIDI devices connected to my computer. Your list is going to look different. But if you have a MIDI device connected to your computer and it's working right, then it should show up in this list. And there's some kind of weird stuff in here. Like, four of these things are one keyboard. There's some kind of extra weird stuff that comes with that keyboard. But this is the one that I want. That's the keyboard I showed you. This Fishman Triple Play is actually a MIDI pickup on a guitar, and maybe I'll show you using that in just a second. But let's do this. So here's my MIDI input. The rest of this I don't need to mess with. MIDI output doesn't matter for us, at least for what we're doing. Okay, so now I'm going to select my I'm going to select my measure. And I'm going to select my rhythm. Now I can click up here to pick my rhythm or I can use the numbers to select my rhythm. And now I'm going to play a chord. Let's see. Let's do. And boom. Alright. Now, this is weird for piano because it didn't split my piano, right? It recorded everything in the right hand, not in the bass clef. So I should do this, just the right hand and then just the bass clef. So let's do it. So now I'm going to click here and do bass clef. There we go. And I'm actually going to do that twice. All right. And let's do this twice too. What did I do? Something That's okay. Okay, cool. So that's how we can enter notes that way. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, No, no, no, no, no. That's not what I want to do. What I want to do is just play and have it get it. Let's think about that. Here's why that's way harder than you think. If we just hit record and start playing, it has to figure out our rhythms. And if you are a normal human being, your rhythms are going to sway a little bit with the tempo, because that's how we like music to work. But Mucore wants your rhythms to be perfect. And if they're not perfect, it's going to notate them assuming you are a robot and they are perfect. So you're going to get crazy rhythms. So I think there might be a way to do that, where you just hit record and play, but it never works. It never looks good. So I highly recommend you don't do that. What most people do that get good at this is they use this one of these, actually, like the small number pad things. And they have one of these by their left or right hand, and then they play a piano keyboard with their other hand, and they're just, I've seen people do amazing things at it. And that actually is, like, pretty understandable. Like, you could you just got to get your cursor set up like this. And then if I press four, Oh, I don't know why. Those all bunched together. I can play chords. Right? So as long as I'm not changing rhythms, I can just play all day. And if I'm really good at MuseScore, I could actually go back and tidy that up. Let's say, Well, I just want to get rid of some notes and fix it up. So there are some things you can do, actually. We'll talk about editing notes actually in a few minutes. Okay, so those are our main inputting note methods. Let me tell you about my personal approach to inputting notes and kind of how I think about it. 21. My Working Method: Okay, so when it comes to my own work, how do I work? How do I like to do this kind of stuff? If I'm writing acoustic music, my normal working method is to write music usually by hand on staff paper first. Not always. If I'm really in a hurry, I don't. But usually, that's what I like to do if I can. Then I take it into a notation program and I use a mouse and I click it in. I click every node in. And that, to me, is the first big step in my editing process, actually. To click every note in kind of makes me rethink every note, and I kind of like the tedious nature of it. It just helps me work through everything. It's a revision process, you know, and I leave stuff out and I add stuff in. So I like doing it that way, even though it does kind of take me a long time, but I'm pretty fast at it at this point, to be perfectly honest. So that's the way I approach it. I could play it in on piano or a guitar, a mini guitar or something, but I really just prefer the kind of zen quality of clicking it in. It's meditative and it gives me a chance to review everything I wrote and make sure every note is exactly where I want it. So you do you, but that's what I like to do. So something to think about. Alright, before we end this section, let me really quick. Talk about a couple principles around editing notes. 22. Editing Notes: Okay, if you want to edit notes, like, let's look at this crazy stuff that I just, like, ruined our nice, pretty piece with. All of your real, like, Microsoft Word editing things still apply, okay? So I can click on a note and I can press the delete key. And I'm going to be left with the rest. I can click on empty space within a measure to select the whole measure, and then I can press the delete key to get rid of that whole measure and will replace it with a whole rest. Okay? I can select a whole measure by clicking empty space within that measure like here. And then I can shift, click empty space in another measure and delete both of those. I can shift, click to select a few beats in a measure. And just get rid of those. I can select a measure and Command C to copy and click an empty measure and command V to paste. I can shift click to select just a few notes and paste those in paste those somewhere. Command V, paste those somewhere else. Click on just this rest V. Cut, copy, paste, delete, all of that stuff. Those things all still work. I can also click on a note and then use the arrow keys to change that note. Chromatically, it's going up and down. Or I can click on that note, and once it's highlighted, I can change it by using things up here. I can add a rest, a tie, an accent, an accidental, even, like, natural, whether it needs it or not. So I can use courtesy accidentals that way. So some basic editing of what we're doing. Alright, so I'm going to get rid of all this goofy piano stuff I rather liked what we had. And, um, in fact, the funny thing is, when I started to put down that piano part, I actually had an idea that I thought I was gonna like. And it was this. So big C major chord. Maybe I'll just do this so you can see how I would edit this. This is a A F sharp, a decord. So let's take these notes. Take them up to a D, this up to an A. That up to a D and F sharp, that up to an F sharp, that up to an A, and this up to a D. What I'm doing here, if you're wondering, I'm just making chords that match this chord in the piano. I'm going to copy that, put them here, and then I'm going to change the notes on those chords to match this. What we have here B flat, D F C. So let's go B flat. B flat, D F. F B flat, D. It's fine. We'll leave the C off there. Then this goes to F A C F. No, D F A F C. So like a D seven. F. And then we'll go F A D F, F, A D, and then C. Alright, let's hear it. Pretty. Okay. Let's move on and start talking about the extras that we can add text lyrics and chords. 23. Musescore Files and Sharing: Okay, so before we move on, let me show you how to save and share a file because I want to give you this file in case that's useful to you. So you're going to go to the file, save menu. Now when you do that, you're going to get this window that pops up, okay? So you can save it to the cloud, which means save it tomscore.org or that audio.com or org thing. I'm not really sure what that is. You can do that. You can totally do that if you want to. You might want to do that if you're using that iPad program and you want to share things between the two programs. But for me, I just want to save it on my computer. So I'm going to click on here, Save to computer, okay? That's like the normal way. This screen is, like, weirdly confusing. Just click Save to the computer, okay? So you're going to do that, and then it's going to be normal. It's going to pop up a little thing. So you're going to save it, and then it's going to just work like a normal file. So just like Microsoft Word, it's going to be a Musqore file. So I'm going to now give you this version of the file. That we've made so far. And we might make more versions of it as we go. So this current version of it is going to be called 25 J's Muscore class. Maybe we'll add to it throughout the class. We'll see how it goes. But this will be added either in the next thing in this class or in the file section, depending on where you're watching it. Okay, let's move on and talk about text lyrics and courts. 24. Text Types: Okay, there's a lot of different text within a score, right? We can already see a lot of text on the screen. And for the most part, you can double click on that text to change it. So up here, you can kind of see this dotted line here. So we can just double click on that and we're going to get the ability to change. There we go. Subtitle can be whatever we want, our title. Okay, we've already seen that changing the name or abbreviation of instruments is a little bit different kind of text. In order to do it, we're going to double click, and then we're going to get into it and we can change it here and here. Okay? Cancel to get out of that. Now, we can also go to our text palette, and we have a bunch of different kinds of text here. Okay? Now, all of these do different things. Now, what's important to note here is that there's some hidden things for each of these types of text. So if I do like pits, this text, this type of text, this not only is it um, let's see, Let's put it on our clarinet. Not only is this a certain size of text, a certain font of text, but also this does have instructions for what the playback engine should do. It's going to try to get it to do pits. Now, what is it going to do in a clarinet? I don't know. Let's see if it does anything. It might just be confused. Okay, so let's hear if it does anything. Okay, it's not doing anything, and I think the reason is there's no such thing as pits on a clarinet. Pits is a string instruction. But if we put this on strings, it's going to make them do pits. So, again, it's important what kind of text you use. If I just change this to what it says to, like, Arco that's not really going to work very well now, is it? Because the behind the scenes, it's still telling strings to pits, okay? So don't do that. So down here, we have pits. I can put on something. I could also put Arco on something. And if you notice that technique I just did, I can click on a note and then click on the palette item, if you want. This works in most palettes. Or I can just click on an item and drag it to it. Okay? Again, make sure you're paying attention to where it's attaching, right, so that that little pink line is connecting to the right spot. But you don't really want to change what those say because they're doing stuff, right? They have things. If you just want blank text that you can use to write anything you want, use this staff text one. That doesn't really do anything, but it's a good thing to put there. Like, I use this for notes all the time. Like, I'm going to put it right there, and I'm just going to double click on it, and I'm going to write not sure about this chord. And then, maybe I might come back to that later. Earlier when we were looking at some of my student projects, you saw little text notes like that all over the place. And that's something that I like students to do just to tell me what they're thinking while they're working on stuff. Okay, so be sure you're using So the lesson to learn here is that the type of text you use matters. If you just want blank text, use staff text. 25. Lyrics: Oh, let me point out one more thing before I forget, if you just wanted to use staff text to do pits, you can do that. That's fine. It looks right. It's not going to do anything for your playback. It's not going to try to get them to do pits, but it looks correct. So that can be okay if you're not worried about playback. If you want to delete any text, just click on it once, so it turns blue, and then press the delete key. Okay, let's talk about lyrics. We looked at lyrics briefly before. We used to find lyrics here in the staff or in the text menu, but we don't anymore. Not even in these extra things down here. Whoops. So for lyrics, I believe they're just moved up here. Maybe there's another way to add them, but I'm going to go to add text and then down to lyrics. Okay, now, we looked at this before, but this is us looking at it in more detail now. So here's how lyrics work. So we selected lyrics, and now Oops. Maybe I didn't select it, I don't think. Alright, lyrics. Okay, so now we have a little cursor and we're attached to a note. Okay. Now, every time I press the space bar or the dash, we're going to advance to the next note, okay? So, let's say, let's see, what do we have? Five notes here. Let's say that the lyrics to this are cheeseburger. Okay? Cheeseburger. This whole choir is going to sing the word cheeseburger. And in fact, we're going to go he he's burger. Okay? So, so we're going to say hi. And then I want a melisma. So I'm going to go, let's see, what's correct here. I think it's dash again. Es. And then I'm going to hit space BR space GR or hyphen. Okay? I could also here do instead of dash, I could do underscore, underscore. That does that, which might be more correct. I'm not up to speed on my oral notation, but you can do underscore or dash, whichever is more correct. Now, in order for this to be super correct, I need a slur to connect these, right? So I'm going to select this note and this note by holding Shift and then clicking on that G. Okay? So I'm going to select those three notes. It looks like the whole bar is selected, but that's just because those are the only three notes in the bar. So I'm going to select those three notes by clicking on the first one, Shift clicking on the third one, and then I'm going to select slur. Okay. Boom. Look at that. Gorgeous. Okay, now I can do the same thing with the next one. I think there is a way to Woops. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. See what I did is, I clicked and I just started typing. No good. I got it to go add text, lyrics or Command L. So I can do it again, underscore, underscore ESE, space, whoops, spur hyphen GR. All right. And then select Shift select slur. All right. Starting to look like music now, right? Let's finish these off. Command L for lyrics, he Space, Br hyphen GR and last one. Command L, CHE, underscore, underscore, ESE, space, BR hyphen GR. Right? Shift click slur. Ooh. So what just happened there is that it said, Alright, it's getting a little cramped here. It's going to space things apart. There is a rule in music notation. Now, if you want to get really, really into music notation, there's a book called the Norton Manual Music Notation. I have a copy around here somewhere. That is, like, the guide for the rules of music notation. That book has been is as old as time. Um, so there are, like, official rules for notation. One of the official rules is that nothing should touch anything else except for staff lines. So we really don't want things to touch each other. Like, see how this quarter equals 112 is, like, right up against that, but it's not touching it against that slur. So what it just did is it said, things are getting a little too close together. I'm gonna space things out. So it's obeying, like, the rules, and it spaced things out to take up the whole page. So, it actually looks nice this way. Choral music tends to be spaced kind of more farther apart like that. It looks kind of nice. Anyway, so there's text or lyrics. 26. Modifying Text Items: Okay, so remember when we were talking about something like PITS and how I said, you should not just change this text to ARCO because it's got, like, a message in it that says you should that it's going to do some miti stuff and actually try to make it pits. What is there a way to, like, get into the text and actually look at what it's going to do? There is. So we're going to get into the to the weeds here. If you don't want to get into the weeds, skip this one, okay? You don't have to know this. But if you want to see kind of some of the nitty gritty under the hood stuff, here's how you do that. Alright, let's take an example of, like, this rehearsal mark, okay? Let's put it right here. Let's say right here is A. Now, this is a rehearsal mark. So what I really want to happen here is for this rehearsal mark to show up not just on the soprano part, it should show up on all parts, right? And I'm pretty sure it's going to because it's a rehearsal mark, and that's what rehearsal marks do. But let's say I wanted to make my own rehearsal mark. What if I wanted to make this and I wanted to say, um Peanut butter sandwich. There seems to be a theme with this piece. The theme is lunchtime, which it almost is. Okay, so I want this to be peanut butter sandwich. How can I make this text, which I just made as staff text? How can I turn this into a rehearsal mark so that it shows up in all the parts and not just the soprano part, okay? Let's do it. So I'm going to go over to this properties tab, okay? This properties tab is going to tell me everything that it can about that little thing. Okay? So if I click on it, it's visible. It's going to try to auto place it. Can do some stuff about the appearance, put a little buffer on it, offset, snap to grid, bring it forward, bring it backwards, front back, change the color of it if I wanted to. Let's go back over here. Change the font color styles, alignment, all that good stuff. Can explore these thing a box around it if I wanted to, put a circle around it if I wanted to. Oh, it makes a lot of mess. Okay, so what I'm going to do is, first, let's make it bold so that it's nice and strong. And now let's make sure it stays on everything. So here's a trick. We know this A is going to stay because it is a rehearsal mark. Text style rehearsal mark. Click on peanut butter sandwich, text style Staff. Change that to Where's the mark? Boom. Okay? Now it's formatted the same because you can think of these textiles as, like, a predefined set of rules. I think I could still change it. And it still is a rehearsal mark. So I could make it a little smaller and just do that, and we still have it as a rehearsal mark. Okay? So now it should show up on all of the parts and be a nice, good rehearsal mark in our piece. So you can do that for just about anything if you want to make your own custom things. Alright. Next, let's talk about adding chord symbols to your piece. 27. Chord Symbols: Okay, one of the things I get asked a lot in Mu score is how to put chord diagrams on there, like guitar chord strumming diagrams. This is for, like, if you're making like what's called a PVG kind of arrangement. I mean, piano vocal guitar. So you've got, like, a piano part, but there are guitar chord shapes on it so that, like, a guitar player could follow along. It's actually really easy to do. Now, to my knowledge, there's no magic way in MuseScore for it to figure out your chords and just put them on there. I don't think Muscore can do that. But if you know what your chords are, we can go to fretboard diagrams. And here we have all our fretboard diagrams. So I could just go here and know that this is a C major chord and up here, so I could just drop that there. Cool. And there's a C major. That's a C major. This is a D major, I think. Yeah. D major, which if you just let your mouse kind of hover over these chords for just a second, you will see the name pop up kind of under it. So D majors here. And then this, I think was BD F Sharp. No, B flat. So B flat major. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a B chord and see if it'll let me modify it. Okay, so if I go to the properties, I really just need to change that two to a one, and then I have my I get rid of that dot. So I can clear it out. I can do that. Oh, there we go. Okay. And now I just need to change the name of it, which I can do here. There we go. So I just had to modify it and make by drawing a new one, basically. So let's see if we can do that again. So here we have here we have D minor, I believe, FAF, C, D minor seven. But let's just put a D minor here for the moment. And then C again. But Cool. So again, to make that B flat, what I did is I took a B. I took just something close, and then I went to our properties, and then I just hit clear, and then I just drew in what I needed. So you can click notes and then just double click on the name of it to call it what you want, and you have your own chord. Great. Now, if you don't want to show the fingering diagrams, and you just want to show the ord names, you can do that, too. Let's go back to palettes. Well, just to kind of do this. I'll do it on this last one. So I'm going to select a note. I'm going to go to add text, chord symbol, and then I'm going to write C, capital M for major press Return. And that's what it gave me. Maybe I'll just write a C. So in theory, I have a type of text here called C called chord symbol. So if I did something like C minus seven, it would put it in its C minus seven font. Like, you can hear when I click on it, it's playing the right chord, right? Like, let's do CDIM seven, right? It's not playing what's here. It's playing what this chord is. So if we just want C, even, like, C major seven. Okay, so now it's playing court. So I'm gonna get rid of that. And I'll add back in our guitar fingerings, 'cause that was kind of fun to have. There we go. Okay. Let's move on. 28. Guitar Tablature: You know what? Do I see an error in that B flat chord? I do. That's not right. There should be no note there. Clear, let's do this. Bar. Let's just do that. Okay, I just had to make sure that was accurate. Okay, that looks better. Taught my eye. Anyway, what are we talking about here? Oh, yeah, tture. So, I want to talk about two alternative notation things that you can do tableture and drumset notation. If these aren't anything you ever plan on doing, stick around anyway because you might learn how to do some other weird things. So, if we want to add tablature, what I'm going to do is go to instruments, and I'm going to add a new one. So if you're not familiar with what tablature is, it's a way of it's a different style of notation, typically used for string instruments, like guitars and a lot of different kinds of stringed instruments, like lutes and stuff like that. You also use tablature. So let's go to strings, and you'll see some of these are tabletu instruments. If you just want a tableture staff, the quickest and easiest way to do it is just to make one of these. So let's add an acoustic guitar. What you use a tablature staff for is up to you. It doesn't matter. We can change the name of the staff. So let's put it above our piano. Okay? So we're going to adjust where it goes and add it. Okay, that is a tableture staff. It looks good right there. And now the way tableture works, if you're familiar with it is we don't add dots. We add numbers. So we can click numbers in. So if I just do this, it's going to give me a bunch of zeros. So I think I can click and then press a number. So like 125 So, like a major chord. Let's do Here's D minor. So let's do D minor. So that would be 02, three, one. There. Um, cool. So that's adding a tableture line. It's very easy. And if we don't want this to be guitar, we just want to do something else, we can always just go here and change it. Easy peasy. 29. Drum Set Notation: Okay, let's get rid of this stuff. There's a few ways I could do it. If I just click on the name of it and press delete, it's just going to delete the name of it. So if I go up here, and click on the staff once and then press the trash. That's going to actually get rid of it. So let's talk about drum notation. So there is a type of staff that we use for drum kit. And to add one, let's just add a drum. So drums unpitched five piece drum kit. This should get us some drum notation. Where do we want to put that in the middle? Let's put it at the bottom. Alright, this symbol here means we're basically looking at drum notation. I'll try to enter some notes, and they should look like drums. So you see this thing at the bottom. Okay. What this means is these are your drums for your drum set. Okay? This works a little different. You can edit what drums you have by digging deep into this, okay? So each one of these is a different drum set. Okay, so you can edit it if you want. You can hear them by just clicking here. I'm just clicking on each note. And then what's cool is I think you can just drag them up. Yeah. So kick, snare, hi hat. So you can make beats this way. And you can adjust the rhythms with, like, eighth notes, doing that. Move things up. Okay? So you can just enter notes if you want, but it works a little differently. You kind of have to use either the keypad like this and enter these letters that are above this or just drag them up to enter a note. Okay? So that is how you can program drums in muscar. 30. Music Spacing: Okay, I'm going to delete that drum kit because I don't think our nice choral piece about cheeseburgers and peanut butter sandwiches needs a drum kit in it. Now, one thing you'll see speaking of peanut butter sandwiches, you'll see that we got pushed out over here. Mucor is going to constantly be trying to make things neat and tidy, okay? So when I added some drum things, it it spaced things out a little more. So now we only have 4 bars on the screen. Generally, that's what you want. So kind of let it space things out how you want. It pushed things out over here. And that's just fine. Okay, so now for our next thing, I kind of want all of these measures to be back on one page. That'll just be easier for us to work with them. So let me show you how to do that. If you want to kind of overwrite their um, use scores spacing ideas because it does have good ideas about pushing things out to make things have more space and look nicer. But sometimes you're like, No, that's not right. I want you to do it my way. So here's how you can do it. So I'm going to select everything, and then the next measure, okay? I want this and this all to be in one system, right, all on the first page. Okay, so I'm going to select all those. Then I'm going to go over to my palettes. I'm going to go down to layout. There's a layout palette. And then if I go down to I think this one, keep measures on the same system. That's the one I want. I'm going to click it. Boom. And it pulled it all together. Now, Okay, for some reason, it brought over too many measures. That's fine. Let's keep one. And then let's take these three. And let's select those, go back over here. This little icon means section break. So that means break the system there, and there we go. So that threw them over to the next system or the next page in this case. A system is one of these. Okay? Okay. Now in this section, I want to talk about kind of all the other stuff. We're going to kind of rapid fire through a whole bunch of Score instructions and indications, articulations, repeats, dynamics, crescendos, slurs. And then finally, we'll talk about making parts in this section too. Okay, so let's dive right in with repeats and endings. Here we go. 31. Repeats and Endings: Okay. Let's say I want a repeat or maybe a first and second ending thing right here at this rehearsal letter A. Cool. Let's go to my palettes and let's close things up that we're not using. And first, let's go to bar lines. Let's put a double bar line there, maybe. So wherever we have a rehearsal letter, I like to put a double bar line. I think that's a rule, but we'll double but I'm not sure. So I'm going to grab this double bar line, and I'm just going to plop it right there, okay? And it's gonna apply to everything. Now, let's say I want to repeat, okay? So let's grab a repeat, and let's plop it right there. I'm taking it to the top staff, but I don't have to. I can take it down there. It's gonna apply to all staves. Okay, now we have a nice repeat. Okay? Now, what if I wanted to do something more complicated, like a multiple endings, like a second ending or even a Coda, a DS, those kinds of things. We're going to find those here, repeats and jumps, palette. Okay? Here's our symbols, CODA, two CODA DC, DS Alpine, repeats. We already got a repeat. That's okay. But here's our first and second endings. So here we could say first ending. And second ending. And then it goes on from there, right? Now, these should correctly show up in all the parts, even though they're only showing up on the soprano. So in like all of our palettes, be sure if you don't find what you're looking for, check down on this more category. There's a couple weird things in there. If you're really looking for something strange, like DDS Dopiocda Dopo Coda, second Coda, Dopio Double coda, right? Dopio is double. So DDS double coda, in this case, probably means second CODA. I've never seen that in a piece of music for, but I do travel to Italy, and I do know how to order a Dopio espresso. So that's how I know what that means. Anyway. But those are where you're gonna find those tools. Co. Let's talk about dynamics. 32. Dynamics: Okay, now, as you might have figured out, for a lot of this stuff that's coming up, dynamics, articulations, all of this stuff, the answer for almost all of it is find the right palette, okay? So we're looking at dynamics. Let's find our dynamic palette, and it's right here. Okay? Let's open it up. Here's a bunch of dynamics. So for these, so now, again, just remember where you attach them. It's so important. This one, we're attaching it to that tenor line. Now, look what happens when I let go. It's clearly attached to the tenor line. Oh. So it put it at the top of the staff. That's kind of a unique choir music thing. It always looks funny to me because I don't work in the choir world all that much. But if I go to, like, my clarinet, it puts it under the staff because that's where it goes in instrumental music. So we can do crescendi. Let's do this. Why is that pit still there? That looks funny. Okay? So you've already seen this, but we put a crescendo there. We grab that. Now, in the crescendo, the beginning and ending anchor points, you can see where it's anchored with that pink line, what notes it's anchored to. That's important also, and here's why. Like, I'm going to anchor this to that D. Now, when this part is made, if there's, like, a page break right here, right? And this thing isn't properly anchored, then we might just have a dangling crescendo, right? But if it's anchored to the D, then the crescendo is going to break correctly and continue on the next line to the way it should. So just make sure that the beginning and end anchor where they're supposed to anchor. You can do Crescendi this style of crescendo, crash, and just click on it, get the little handles and drag to do that, if that's what you want to do. That's just fine. Can click on these once and press delete to get rid of them. What's down here? Whoa. That is quiet, and that is loud. Dynamics. 33. Articulations: Alright, let's talk articulations. Now, there's some tricks for this one. So first, we're going to find articulations palette, okay? Right there, articulations. Okay? Here's a bunch of stuff. Now, I've found it true that I've been in the situation where I'm like, I've written 20 measures, and I need 20 measures of, like, staccato dots, you know? Like so I'm just going to click this 1,000 times, right? Let's I guess let's go to our piano part, and let's say, maybe all of these low notes need staccato markings. Okay? Well, that kind of sucks to drag these over and over, okay? So I'm gonna hit undo, undo, undo, undo. There's a smarter way to do this. I could just select all of that and then click that button. And now I've just added articulations to everything. This is true with dynamics, too, although it's just you would not want to do that with dynamics. There's not really a use case for that. But if you wanted all of those short, what if you wanted all of these short and accented, okay? Now we've kind of created a mess. Now, there's a slur here. Don't use this. This is a weird slur to use. I think you would use this slur if you wanted a dangling slur, or just a slur you could, like, do weird stuff with, like, like that, you know? Just a real free slur. But if you want a normal slur, you want to use this one, right? That's going to, like, function like a slur. This is basically like a free kind of drawing slur. Here's some other fun stuff, snap pits. Um now, there are key commands for a lot of stuff. Like, if I click on a note and press dot, oh, that's going to add a rhythmic dot. So if you can remember what the key command is for, like, the staccato. Which would be on that document I shared with you earlier. Maybe it's S. Nope, that's a slur. Then you can just bam, bum, bum, p, p, bam, and crank these out all day long. And that's much faster and easier. But I find that just, like, selecting a whole group of stuff that you want, you know, like, accented, select it all and click the accent button and you get all of it very quickly. Okay? I'm going to do Command Z to get rid of that we don't want our singers just screaming about hamburgers. That would be weird. Even singing about just hamburgers is weird, but we're past that. Okay, let's move on. 34. Lines: Okay, one last one and this one, it's called lines. So let's look at these lines. We find slurs again. We find crescendos and D crescendos again. But we also find things like first and second endings again, anything that we're going to be able to, like, stretch out and do over time, trills. So if we want to trill on something, maybe this note, we can do that. Maybe we want it to double click, drag it out to go to there. Okay. And this is a midi thing. I think the midi will play this. Yep. Oddly worked. Right there. Let's leave it. Um Let ring system palmuting octave pedals. That's what I was looking for. So pedaling, we can find here under lines. There's a few different ways to do pedaling for piano. There's this way, and, you know, you can do that. If you want, you can stretch it out. In this case, I kind of like that. But you can also do it this way, which is also just as good. And then that is kind of clunky. These as far as I know, and I'm pretty sure I'm right that these both both this flower way and this symbol way of doing it, mean the same thing. They just mean pedal. And in fact, I like this way a whole bunch more. So I'm going to click it and copy it. You can actually copy things. Just click the note you want it attached to and then Command V. Command V. Command V. This one's getting too long. There. And it should do it. It should kind of hold the pedal down. It won't be very obvious in this example, but maybe we'll hear it. I wouldn't repeated for us. Now, while we're here, I just noticed this clarinet line is a bit loud. So maybe we should add some dynamics to it that soften it a little bit. So let's just mark it as maybe mezzo piano and see if the playback reflects that in a better way. Oh, I already like that I think we're losing some of our choir because of this pianissimo here. So let's do Let's do Mezzo forte on the choir. Whoops. Parts. To start. Whoops. We got two. Oh, that's the clarinet, so we don't want that. And let's give Mezzoforte to the piano too. Alright, now let's hear what we got. Oh, it repeats. Okay, lovely. Let's talk about making parts. 35. Making Parts: Okay, so we looked at the part thing all the way back at the beginning of this class. Let's take another look at it now that we have some actual music to dive into, and let's go all the way through it. So I'm going to click on Parts uppe. And now it says, Which parts do you want me to make? Now, in theory, it's making all of these and updating all of these behind the scenes for us, and we can open whichever one we want. So let's try looking at our clarinet part. In theory, it should have all this stuff. It should also have the title, the name, the subtitle tempo, mezzo forte, this A, first and second ending, repeat and peanut butter sandwich. It should have all of that. Might not look very good. A lot of the times when you make the parts and you look at it the first time, things are in weird places, but it's all there. So you might have to, like, you know, move stuff around and stuff like that. But let's take a look. Alright, here's what it looks like. So here's our notes. Here's our trill, first ending, second ending, A. Now we're in three measures of rest. That's when we kind of made the new break and then 23 measures of rest until the end. Now, the peanut butter sandwich, indication is in this. So if we want that to show, we're going to have to go back to the score and tell it to break this, which is not that hard to do. So let's go back to the score. It'll be up here. So here's our clarinet part. Here's our score. Okay, so peanut butter sandwich is tied to this bar. Okay? So we have to tell this bar to break a multi measure rest so that people see this score indication. The other thing we could do it really should be attached to this bar. That's probably our problem. So let's delete it and attach it to that bar. Text, staff text. Peanut butter sandwich. It doesn't want to go off the page. Okay, so I just updated our peanut butter sandwich to system text, and I didn't change anything else about it. I just use system text, and that will work better for keeping it in the part. So now if I jump back over to our clarinet, I don't need to re extract it or anything, just automatically shows up in the right spot. So you can make all of your parts if you need to or want to. You can also make a new part if you want to select what goes in it. And then you have completed making a great piece of music. Cora. Now, one last thing I want to talk about before we wrap up this class, and that is using high end playback samples to get something sounding really nice. Let's go into it and see what we can do. 36. Using Plugins: Okay, so if you want to experiment with plug ins and good sample libraries, here's what we're going to do. We're going to go to our mixer. Okay? And now we're going to go up to sound where it says MS Basic, and we're going to go to VST three, and we're going to play with this list here. So let me talk about what these plugins are a little bit. I don't think I did before. So if you're not familiar with what VST plugins are, here's kind of the simple rundown. VST plugins are separate programs. They are full programs, and they run on your computer in the background. Now, let me clarify that a little bit more. If let's say you get, like, a really nice sounding professional piano plug in, okay? So it's, like, really high quality piano. And you install that on your computer, ok? You're going to run an installer, do the normal thing and install it just like you install any other program. Then let's say you open Muscore. You will see it in your list of plugins and you can use it. But then let's say you open garage band. You will see it. You'll see that same plug in as something you can use. Let's say later you install a program like Logic, you'll be able to see that. Any audio program will be able to see it. When you install a plugin, you're installing plug ins for your computer, not for the particular not for Mucore, okay? So you're going to install it on your computer, and any program is going to be able to use it. So I haven't installed anything for Mucore. These are just plug ins that I've already installed for this on this computer, okay? Okay, so let's do one quick one really quick. Let's do the piano one. So I happen to have a good piano library in Contact eight here. So contact is another layer. This is going to get kind of confusing, but contact is a sample library player. Contact itself is a free program, and you buy sample libraries that go inside contact, which then goes inside these other programs like Mucore. So I'm going to launch contact, and it looks like this. So then I'm going to launch h. Let's make this a little bigger so we can see. Here are things I've installed here, some basses, some strings, some weird stuff, and some really good pianos. So let's try this piano. So I'm gonna launch this piano. Oh, whoops, I just installed that in the wrong spot. I just installed that on our soprano. So now our soprano is a piano. That's not what I wanted. Okay, undid that, let's go to our piano track. So here's our piano, let's go to VST Native Instruments, Contact eight. And then let's go down to my favorite piano, just this one. Let's load that. So a pretty good sounding piano. Now, this little window is the plug in window, so it's gonna stay open. I'm just gonna throw it to the side. I can close it if I want. Doesn't really matter. Now, let's listen to our piano and our track. Let's listen to our piano. I'm listening to the left hand, I think. H somewhere I erase some notes here. I don't know why my left hand isn't coming through very well. Let's add that. Go back. Here's everything. Wrong note. So sharp. Okay, why is there a wrong note there? Sometimes I make these classes. I'd bump some things around. I must have bumped that somewhere. Okay, but there we go. So we loaded, like, a nice sample library of a piano. It sounds much better than the built in pianos, right? Let me tell you a little bit about how to find really nice sample libraries. 37. Finding Quality Sample Libraries: Okay, I just searched, like, top sample libraries, orchestral. The East West Hollywood Orchestra, East West is probably one of the top libraries. Spitfire Audio is one. Heaviosity is a good one. Um, You can go to any of the websites for this and listen to demos made with them. Make sure it's what you want, because, like, East West Hollywood orchestra is going to be a real good sounding orchestra. Output substance is going to be weird stuff. It's not an orchestra. I have this one. It's great. But it's weird. Project Sam is a good orchestra. So there's a lot of, like, fun, weird stuff, and then there's a lot of, like, realistic sounding stuff. One that I would encourage you to check out is BBC Symphonic Orchestra spitfire Library. This, I believe, there is a free version of the BBC Symphonic Orchestra. Um, BBC symphonic orchestra professionals, $700. These big libraries of orchestras, they're not cheap. You can get some cheap ones, but I believe because this is a collaboration with the BBC, there is a free version of it. Here's what it sounds like. Pretty realistic, huh? I think it's this. The Core, BBC symphonic orchestra Corp. Or you can get piano Corp. I believe this is just free. Oh, no, it's 314. Here it is. BBC symphonic orchestra Discover. Okay? It's free. It's gonna be still great, but it's gonna be smaller than the other ones. But, you know, a great place to start. It's gonna be a good sounding orchestra for you. So check this one out. I mean, listen to what you can do. That's pretty good. H. That's a darn good orchestra for free. So, check this out. Search for Spitfire Audio, which, by the way, Spitfire makes a lot of stuff, not endorsement by any means. They make a lot of stuff. It's all quite good. I've had good experience doing stuff with them. Spitfire Audio BBC symphonic orchestra Discover is the name of the version. Yeah. Get it. It's great. Explore around. Find some other stuff. You can find a lot of free stuff, a lot of free libraries. Around the Internet. The Internet's got a lot of stuff. You just check it out. Yep. 38. Sample Library Examples: Let's do one more just to go over that setup again because it was kind of weird. Let's leave our piano doing what it's doing. But I don't have a good library of vocal stuff, but I do for strings. So let's try changing our choir to a string quartet, just for fun. Okay? So I'm going to go to our soprano, and change it to a violin. So I'm going to again go to contact and this time, I'm going to load up this thing called sinistring solo. I'm going to load up violin one. These samples, these are solo violins, not ensembles, so solo, and they're big. They have a lot of samples in them. They take a long time to load. And that tends to mean they're quite good. I hate to say just because they're big and have a lot of sounds that they're big, that they're good. But that's kind of true. So I'm gonna fast forward until this is done loading, so you don't have to wait. Okay, let's hear what this string looks like. Let's solo my soprano and hear it. That's a pretty nice sounding violin. Alright, let's change our Alto to also a violin. Okay. That's when I get bigger S a string solo. Violin two. Okay? This is also going to take a minute or two to load. It's probably actually gonna take like 3 minutes is what the last one take. I'll do a quick little Oh, it's done. Okay. Now I have a bunch of these windows open. Oh, it's still going. Never mind. I'll cut to this being done loaded. Loading. Okay, let's keep going. Native instruments. Contact eight. Not all sample libraries need contact. This contact eight thing, but a lot of them do. Alright, we're gonna switch this to Viola legato. And I'll be right back when it's done loading. All right. Now, if you're saying, like, what is all the stuff on the screen? These are just different mini settings we can adjust. The defaults are usually great. Alright, and then for our base, let's try to use ten or a Clllo instead of a base. Might be too high, but we'll see. This is just for fun. Alright, last one. And we're gonna go Cello legato, in this case, and I'll be right back. Last one. All right. So we loaded pretty nice string library for each of these. Let me give them a little push so we can kind of hear those at the front of our mix. Let's hear it. Meat. 39. What Comes Next?: Alright, everybody. Thanks for watching. At this point in the class, we've reached the end, but I have a few things for you, first and foremost, what I'd like to do is think about where you could go next. So now you know how to use MuseScore pretty well. What would be a great next thing to do on your learning journey? I might recommend some of my composition classes or some of my music theory classes. Both of those would be really valuable to you, I think, depending on what your reason is for wanting to learn music score. I also have a bunch of orchestration classes that might be really good for you. Orchestration is, like, the study of how instruments come together for the purposes of writing music. So blending the sounds to make new colors and things and managing the orchestra. But it doesn't have always to do with just writing music for the orchestra, although that's a big part of it. So check those out. You can find those here on this site or any other site. But you've come this far. You've learned this much. I'm super excited for you. Let's keep going and keep learning more together. Okay, I've one more video for you and then a little extra goodies for you. So stick around. Here we go. 40. Bonus Lecture: Hey, everyone. I want to learn more about what I'm up to. You can sign up for my email list here. And if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also, check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there, and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me in one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.